Bacon's precepts refer rather to external conduct and worldly fortune
than to the inner composition of character, or to the 'wide, gray,
lampless' depths of human destiny. We find the same national
characteristic, though on an infinitely lower level, in Franklin's
oracular saws. Among the French sages a psychological element is
predominant, as well as an occasional transcendent loftiness of feeling,
not to be found in Bacon's wisest maxims, and from his point of view in
their composition we could not expect to find them there. We seek in
vain amid the positivity of Bacon, or the quaint and timorous paradox of
Browne, or the acute sobriety of Shaftesbury, for any of that poetic
pensiveness which is strong in Vauvenargues, and reaches tragic heights
in Pascal.[30] Addison may have the delicacy of Vauvenargues, but it is
a delicacy that wants the stir and warmth of feeling. It seems as if
with English writers poetic sentiment naturally sought expression in
poetic forms, while the Frenchmen of nearly corresponding temperament
were restrained within the limits of prose by reason of the vigorously
prescribed stateliness and stiffness of their verse at that time. A man
in this country with the quality of Vauvenargues, with his delicacy,
tenderness, elevation, would have composed lyrics. We have undoubtedly
lost much by the laxity and irregularity of our verse, but as
undoubtedly we owe to its freedom some of the most perfect and
delightful of the minor figures that adorn the noble gallery of English
poets.

It would be an error to explain the superiority of the great French
moralists by supposing in them a fancy and imagination too defective for
poetic art. It was the circumstances of the national literature during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which made Vauvenargues for
instance a composer of aphorisms, rather than a moral poet like Pope.
Let us remember some of his own most discriminating words. 'Who has more